touch events not firing on anchor with no href

On my iPhone I couldn't get a click event to fire on this anchor until I added

href="javascript:"

to the anchor. The anchor was added to the DOM after the page load. I'm able to recreate this by using JS to add an anchor to the DOM and confirmed it doesn't register the click, but if I added it on page load it does.

This suggests that the phone/browser/OS is somehow treating the elements differently if loaded to the DOM via javascript, but it's the same HTML.

I have a few questions:

Why does the href need to be there for the click event to fire.

Is there another method to get the event to register? (I was thinking something to do with tab index or something like that.)

Is this specific to OS/Device/Browser/Platform or is this something working as it should per W3C documentation?